Some Winter Days in Iowa | Page 2

of storm and snow.
* * * * *
We shall begin our pilgrimages lacking in Nature's lore, many of us, as
were four men who recently walked down a city street and looked at
the trees which lined the way. One confessed ignorance as to their
identity; another thought he knew but couldn't remember; a third said
they looked like maples; and a fourth thought that silence, like honesty,
as the copybooks used to tell us, was the best policy. And yet the name
linden was writ large on those trees,--on the beautiful gray bark, the
alternate method of twig arrangement, the fat red winter buds, which
shone in the sunshine like rubies, and especially on the little cymes of
pendulous, pea-like fruit, each cyme attached to its membranaceous
bract or wing. Of course, if the pedestrians had been in the midst of rich
woods and there found a trunk of great girth and rough bark,
surrounded by several handsome young stems with close-fitting coats,
the group looking for all the world like a comfortable old mother with a
family of fresh-faced, willowy, marriageable daughters, every member
of the quartet would have chorused, bass-wood.
But no one need be ashamed to confess an ignorance of botany.
Botanical ignorance is more common than poverty. It has always been
prevalent. And the cause of it may be traced back to the author of all
our short-comings, old Adam. We read that every beast of the field and
every fowl of the air were brought to Adam to see what he would call
them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the
name thereof. But why, oh why, didn't he name the trees? If he had
known enough of the science to partake of the fruit of the tree of life he
might have lived long enough to write a systematic botany, satisfactory
alike to the Harvard school of standpat systematists and their
manual-ripping rivals in nomenclature. But he didn't; and no one else
may ever hope to do it.
Eve had never read a book on how to know the wild fruits, and her first
field work in botany had a disastrous termination; it complicated the

subject by the punishment of thorns and thistles. Cain's conduct
brought both botany and agriculture into disrepute. Little more is heard
until Pharaoh's daughter went botanizing and found Moses in the
bulrushes. Oshea and Jehoshua showed some advancement by bringing
back grapes and figs and pomegranates from the brook Eschol as the
proudest products of the promised land. But Solomon was the only man
in the olden times who ever knew botany thoroughly. We are told that
he was wiser than all men. "Prove it," says some doubting reader,
moving for a more specific statement. So the biographer adds: "He
spake of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop
that springeth out of the wall."
Four centuries later, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego
anticipated Emerson's advice about eating bread and pulse at rich men's
tables. The historian tells us that they were men skilful in all wisdom,
cunning in knowledge, and understanding science. Possessing such
wisdom, Daniel knew it would be easy to mix up the wicked elders
who plotted against the virtue of the fair Susanna by asking them a
question of botany. One said he saw her under a mastick tree and the
other under a holm tree. This gave Shakespeare that fine line in The
Merchant of Venice, "A Daniel come to judgment; yea, a Daniel." But
in these latter days we rarely read the story of Susanna, and
Shakespeare's line is not understood by one play-goer in fifty.
When the diminutive Zaccheus climbed into a shade tree which graced
a town lot in Jericho he gave the translators for "the Most High and
Mighty Prince James" another puzzle, for they put him on record as
going up into a sycamore tree. We had always supposed that this was
because the sycamore's habit of shedding its bark made smooth
climbing for Zaccheus. But scientific commentators tell us now that it
was not a sycamore tree, but a hybridized fig-mulberry!
* * * * *
But all this is digression. The best time to begin keeping that New
Year's nature resolution is now, when the oaks are seen in all their
rugged majesty, when the elms display their lofty, graceful, vase-like
forms, and when every other tree of the forest exhibits its peculiar

beauty of trunk, and branch, and twig. Often January is a most
propitious month for the tenderfoot nature-lover. Such was the year
which has just passed. During the first part of the month the weather
was almost springlike; so bright and balmy that a robin was seen in an
apple-tree, and the brilliant plumage of